Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, recently commissioned IDC to conduct a major ransomware and disaster preparedness survey, which found that 79 percent of respondents have activated a disaster recovery (DR) response within the past 12 months. Nearly two thirds (61 percent) of these incidents were triggered by ransomware or other malware with 60 percent of organizations reporting they had experienced unrecoverable data during that same time — substantially more than the 43 percent response rate to the same question a year ago.
The IDC White Paper, ‘The State of Ransomware and Disaster Preparedness: 2022’, survey was carried out across North America and Western Europe among medium to large organizations. Respondents reported an average of 19.3 attacks (all types) and 2.3 ransomware attacks in the past year with 93 percent of organizations suffering a data-related business disruption during the past 12 months and 67.8 percent of respondents experiencing four or more such disruptions.
With so many attacks taking place, the chances of a breach have become very high. Of the respondents that reported being attacked, 83 percent indicated that at least one attack resulted in data corruption. Of even greater concern, 59.6 percent of respondents have experienced unrecoverable data loss within the past 12 months.
The proliferation of applications and the associated increased data creation are making the effort to keep data always available more difficult. Moreover, the research indicates that more than 80 percent of new applications will be deployed in the cloud or at the edge with most cloud applications being either SaaS or cloud-native containerized configurations. As a result of this shift to the cloud, IDC predicts that by 2025 55 percent of organizations will have adopted a cloud-centric data protection strategy. Although data will continue to be protected at the core, cloud, and edge, IDC expects enterprise data protection and DR will be managed from the cloud.
In addition, the survey found that most organizations lack confidence in their current backup and DR solutions. Only 28 percent of respondents expressed 100 percent confidence in their backup system’s ability to recover data, and 29 percent have 100 percent confidence in their DR solution to recover data, though both numbers are higher than the prior survey.
